Prof. Ron McClamrock's vaguely academic web home

The teaching meme

I’ve been tagged by P.D. with the “Why do you teach and why is academic freedom critical to that effort?” meme; so here goes.

I too am first inclined to the glib response, that I teach because I’m a philosopher, and how the hell else am I going to make a living doing that? But in addition to that, I suppose I can say something less glib.

As central as any motivation to my teaching is the idea of helping and encouraging students to make the turn to being their own (semi) mature and (quasi) rational selves, in charge of what they believe, and not either mere followers of or reactions to the system of beliefs given to them by their parents and culture.

This came up explicitly a couple of years ago: The Dean’s Office at my university runs some summer orientation programs for incoming students and their parents, and one of the functions is a lunch for just the parents (maybe 150-200 of them) and any faculty they can talk into coming. The dean says a few words, there’s lunch, and then some member of the faculty (taken off the list of recent teaching award winners, apparently) gives a light little after-lunch 10-15 minute talk of some kind of general interest. And in this case, that was me.

I’d seen a friend (who’s a terrific teacher) do one of these before, and he’d done a nice and comforting bit on being the parent of a kid looking at colleges himself, and seeing the process from both sides and all that. But that’s not me.

So, I told them what I think is true: That views on politics, religion, ethics, metaphysics, or anything else like that never really become yours until you get to that place where you at least seriously confront the possibility that you’re profoundly wrong in what you think; and that it’s the path you take away from that moment of doubt that makes the view your own, whether that path is back to something like you started from, or totally in the opposite direction. And perhaps my most important job as a teacher of philosophy is to get them to that critical point, and give them a few signs pointing to the various paths back down from there.

So as parents, I was telling them that I took my job to be to make their kids think that everything they’d learned so far — from teachers, parents, whomever — might well be completely wrong, and then give them some guidance on finding their way back from that wilderness — all in the guise of supporting their autonomous flourishing, of course. And so if their jock daughter came home dressed in black saying she was an existentialist, or their nice blue-state son came home listening to Rush, then I was doing my job, because my job was to get them to question the things they thought they knew. If all goes well, they should pretty much think everything that their parents taught them was crap pretty soon. And if they did that, and continue to search and grow in their thinking, eventually they’d come to realize —- like we did — that only about half of it was totally wrong.

The parents seemed range in reaction between getting it and laughing along on the one hand, to getting uncomfortable and laughing nervously on the other. And although I might have misread her, the dean seemed more on the uncomfortable end of this range, since the point of these things is to make parents comfortable, not to tell them the truth. But I think that’s what I did.

So the importance of academic freedom is absurdly obvious: I think it’s my job to expose students to things that confront and contradict some of their most deeply treasured beliefs; without academic freedom, those seem like exactly the things I’m most likely to lose the ability to do.

(A little postscript: As I passed a bit of an age milestone recently, I am more self-conscious about the fact that I’m doing old guy things. One of these is answering requests for my views about something by recounting an anecdote.)

Is that what you work on?

From PhD Comics

Teaching and tutoring

In the past few years I’ve noticed a little trend that has seemed to accelerate recently, and it’s this: The college students in my classes seem much more likely to respond to not doing well in my class by asking about and seeking out tutors in the subject.

Normally, I just tell them that they might want to try coming to office hours (mine, or my TAs if it’s a class with TAs) and asking questions — after all, like most of my colleagues, my sense is that my office hours (and those of my TAs) are underutilized, and that we often sit there doing other work during those hours since nobody is showing up. I explain that the TAs are better at this than any tutor they’re likely to hire, that I’m the one who designed the course and so know it best, and that we’re all already being paid to spend time helping them.

But most (not all) of them aren’t interested in this. They seem to want to pay somebody to be assistant, coach, and trail guide for them, and whose role as their ally isn’t in any way “compromised” by also having the role of some kind of gatekeeper, evaluator, and grader.

Maybe it’s that they don’t want to “seem dumb” in front of the person who grades their work (although frankly, the idea that asking even a “dumb” question in office hours is going to affect whether they get a 63 or a 74 on the exam is, from my perspective, pretty farfetched). Or maybe they think that as gatekeeper as well as coach, we will somehow “hold back” on what we tell them.

I don’t know. And it’s not even that I think such students are necessarily looking for the “easy way out”. I think that they may well think that this is the natural path of putting in extra work, effort, and resources.

But I have some nagging fear that at least some significant part of this trend (if it is that) is grounded in an anti-egalitarian sense that the appropriate response to a challenge or roadblock — even in the quasi-meritocracy of the academic world — is to spend money and buy the support that will get you a better grade, rather than to put in more time, to make better use of the shared resources (like the instructor and TAs).